Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Continuing Anglican Jurisdictions to Hold Joint Synod

The leaders of four Continuing Anglican Churches
have announced plans for Joint Synods to meet in Atlanta, Georgia, the week of
October 2nd to 6th. At the conclusion of the week it is the intention of
the Churches to sign an agreement establishing full communion (communio in sacris) among the four
bodies as well as a pledge to pursue in a determined and deliberate fashion
increasingly full unity. The Churches also will discuss common plans for
mission and evangelism. Each Church will hold its own mandatory business
meetings and Synods, but the four will join together throughout for common
worship and social occasions.

The four Churches and their episcopal leaders are
the Anglican Church in American (Brian Marsh), the Anglican Catholic Church
(Mark Haverland), the Anglican Province of America (Walter Grundorf), and the
Diocese of the Holy Cross (Paul Hewett).

This is indeed good news,
and I do hope this works out.But
a joint synod is no guarantee of future unity.With high hopes, I attended a joint meeting between the
Reformed Episcopal Church (REC) and the Anglican Province of America in June
2005.It was an excellent time and
an eventual merger was expected.

It never happened for
reasons that have left my memory.

I also hope Abp. Haverland
proves himself more interested in unity than he seemed to be at the Anglican
Congress in 2015.He preached a
sermon there that, based on the content, could have been titled “Why I can’t be
in unity in you.” It was not
especially winsome.To be fair, he
obviously does have some interest in unity; otherwise, this meeting would not
be planned.

In any case, I do wish
these jurisdictions the best, including Haverland’s ACC.The more unified orthodox Anglicanism
is, the better.